


a good soldier to a lady: but what is he to a lord?

by redletters



Category: Much Ado About Nothing (2011), Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
Genre: 1970s, Drinking, F/M, M/M, Multi, Pre-Canon, Pre-Threesome, warning - mention of Margaret Thatcher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:13:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25964167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redletters/pseuds/redletters
Summary: "I am sure he is in the fleet; I would he had boarded me."Gibraltar, 1979, election night. Beatrice sneaks out of her uncle's mansion to go to the pub. Benedick is on shore leave. Don Pedro has an open tab.
Relationships: Beatrice/Benedick/Don Pedro (Much Ado About Nothing)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 35
Collections: CAILURE EXCHANGE 2020





	a good soldier to a lady: but what is he to a lord?

**Author's Note:**

> FOR #2
> 
> To my recipient: You said you liked the 2011 version so I wrote it with that setting and cast in mind. I hope you enjoy!  
> To all readers: I regret to say this means 1979 Benedick looks like [this](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7GkD5zX4AAmHje?format=jpg&name=large). Look, sorry, I don't make the rules.

Beatrice sat in the kitchen with a bottle of cava and her uncle, watching the BBC election coverage and waiting for the first exit polls to come in. Out in the ballroom, the servants at the Governor-General's mansion were clearing away glasses of fizz, sherry, and rioja - remnants of far too many toasts to Prince Don Pedro, the young new Admiral of the Fleet. 

"Oof! That's that," her aunt said, coming in. She sat across from her husband and lit a cigarette; her daughter, Hero, trailed with a Buck's fizz.

"You sure you can handle that?" Beatrice said over her shoulder. Hero, who had just turned 15, ignored her; Beatrice took this as a good sign of her cousin's future independence of thought, and stole a crab cake off a tray destined for the washing-up. 

The exit polls were in: the projected results flashed up at the bottom of the screen. 

"Well," her uncle said. "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer," and, failing to finish the quotation, took a sip of his sherry.

"Is that a whiff of political opinion I scent?" Beatrice said, waggling a finger. 

"Just an observation," Leonato said, smiling benevolently at his wife. She exhaled; she was wearing a pussy bow blouse and briefly sitting with her heeled feet up. 

Beatrice listened to Dimbleby for a minute or two, then pushed herself up. The bottle was finished. "Eurgh - I'm going to stretch my legs in the garden," she said. 

"Don't be too late," her uncle said. "It's gone ten o'clock."

"Oh, you know me," Beatrice said. "Wahooo! Thursday night on the Rock! Rock!!" She threw a pair of horns. 

Leonato and Hero watched her leave. 

It was a warm May night, although the air off the Atlantic was crisp and blue, and Beatrice didn't bother with a jacket. She grabbed a pair of sunglasses, in case she spotted anyone she knew, slipped on her dark espadrilles, and let herself out the side door to the garden. Rather than using the front gate and alerting the rest of the household, she climbed the half-hedge to the lane beside the estate, and brushed herself off on the other side. 

In ten minutes' time she was in town, and had her pick of pubs: The Racist One, The Expensive One, The Really Racist One, The One With Teenagers Drinking Alcopops, and The One That Plays Buffalo Springfield All The Time. The problem, she thought, as she pushed the door open to The One That Plays Buffalo Springfield All The Time, was that there was nowhere to have a really _private_ drink. It would be nice to be alone – too many people all evening, and not allowed to do more than smile at any of them, at risk of the Governor-General's sharpest displeasure. But Beatrice wanted to drink, and she wanted to not be at her uncle's, and on a rock two-and-a-half miles square, there were only so many places to go. 

A waft of guitar hit her, and she went to the bar. Someone flicked on the small television on the far wall.

Beatrice pulled up a stool and sat in it backwards.

"Oh, here we go," someone called out loudly in a Scottish voice. He stood up in front of the television, waving his arms and pretending to try to block the screen with his slight figure. "Turn on the lights, I'm so sorry ladies and gents, the pub's closing. Everyone go home, it's over."

"Sit down, Benny," someone yelled. 

He threw his arms together indeterminately into the space in front of him. "I'm getting another drink." He came up, and leaned forward next to Beatrice, rapping his fingers lightly on the wood bar, moving. 

Beatrice leaned back and looked him over. "Not a fan of Mrs. Thatcher?" she said. It would have been a daring comment in her usual life, but then, that was the point of going out.

"Why, absolutely I am!" he said cheerfully. "How could anybody not love that compulsively compelling cocktail of union-busting, Imperial posturing, and that oh-so-delicate whiff of National Front at the back of the nostrils." He turned to Beatrice and looked at her properly. "Gosh," he said. "Anyway, what a disgusting night to be talking politics."

"Absolutely," she said, leaning forward now, against the bar. "What's your name?"

"Diego Fontaine," he said immediately. "I'm the tragically impoverished, but nevertheless incredibly handsome, younger son of the younger son of the last king of Portugal."

"Oh! It must be hard for you, being so close to your lost ancestral home," Beatrice agreed. "You're in the British Navy?"

He looked down at his casual blues. "Oh, yes! I've joined a foreign legion and am fighting to regain my lost title. It's been a bit slow tootling up and down the Med, but you can't fault the company. And you?"

"Dominique de Arbois-Comtois-Fluvoise," Beatrice said. "My mother was a humble shepherdess from Switzerland, but," leaning in further still, so that he bent forward to almost meet her, "my father was the illegitimate son of Salvador Dali and Princess Anastasia."

" _Enchanté_ ," he said, taking her hand and bowing over it. "And can I say, you look just like her. Look – what can I get you?"

Beatrice felt a little light, probably from having been drinking steadily for hours. "Christ. Beer?" she said. His fingers fell from hers.

"Round of Estrellas, por favor," he said cheerfully to the barman, and when the cold bucket came he grasped it in one hand, slipped the other around her elbow and steered her to a shadowed table where two teenagers in matching jean jackets were perched, empty bottles in front of them, deep in a horrifically earnest looking conversation. 

"Off," he said to the teens.

The kids looked at each other. "Excuse me? We're sitting here?" one said. 

"Yes," the man said, "and you've finished your drinks, it's past your bedtime, and I'm extremely unconvinced either of you are older than 14." 

The other kid looked up at Beatrice in supplication. Beatrice put her palms on the table and bent down. "Scram," she said. 

They scrammed.

"Now," said her new friend with the made-up name, "Tell me everything about your life story, from the no doubt torrid beginning to this delightful consummation. Leave nothing out. How did your father even meet this shepherdess?"

The pub was dark, and Beatrice kicked her feet out in front of her and relaxed into the beer. No need for anyone to stand on ceremony here, unlike her uncle's home, which was nothing but status and structure and reminders of exactly how she failed to live up to everything, and how she wasn't just letting her family down – she was letting Gibraltar, and really, her whole country down. It made her want to run up to the Rock and knock it right over. One afternoon she'd tried. 

This man, though. He was like a spark, a live wire set alight by some current. Beatrice felt it buzzing in her too; she wondered if anyone else could. 

A person, a man, intruded. It was Don Pedro, standing at attention over their table. Beatrice blinked up at him for a moment. They'd been drinking together in such different circumstances, six hours ago, that it took her a moment to place him here. 

"Good evening," the prince said. 

He was very handsome. His manner was hesitant, for a Navy man, and a royal at that. Beatrice instinctively straightened up and then realised what she'd done, hated herself for it, and threw herself against the seat, legs and arms akimbo like a melting Surrealist painting.

"Good evening!" she chirped, a little sharp at this intrusion of her uncle's world into her evening. 

Her Navy friend, in the meantime, was all scrambling politeness and pleasure. 

"Your Grace!" he said, delighted and a little over his head. 

"Ben," the prince said, leaning over to shaking his hand.

Behind him, Beatrice mouthed, _Ben?_ with horror. 

"And of course you must know – " 

"Lady Beatrice."

Ben visibly recoiled at the _Lady_ , and Beatrice rolled her eyes at him. "Honorary title," she said with an exaggerated and grimacing tone.

"Oh, of course."

"Come join us," she said to Don Pedro, not wanting to leave him standing. The prince made an _oh-all-right-then_ bob too quickly – Christ, he really must not have any friends – and slipped into the booth on her right side. She was sad to be losing Ben all to herself, but then he didn't show an inclination to move on. Instead, after barely a moment's blinking, he propped his elbows on the table and went into an impression of the various commands and commanders the fleet had had for the past year, leaving Don Pedro choking with laughter and Beatrice stunned with a sort of recognition of someone who could match – maybe even surpass, though she wouldn't admit to it if it came to that – what she herself could do and excelled at. 

She interjected with a correction to an observation about a cocktail party, and he ceded the floor with a wink and very bright eyes. 

The pub closed at two o'clock. None of them noticed until the barman, who respected neither place nor person nor position, came and cleared all of their glasses away. Beatrice had been in the toilet, or she never would have let him have them; but Ben, she discovered on leaving, had secreted their mostly full bottle of cava, which the prince had ordered, from the publican's grasping eye. Where he had hidden it she didn't know, he was thin as a sardine, but he had it and it was still chilled. His fingers on the bottle when he passed it to her were warm. 

"A bit temperate, isn't it," Don Pedro said, pulling at his collar with characteristic royal understatement. 

"It's still hot as the devil's kitchen," Beatrice agreed fully, and enunciating maybe too much. "Walk?"

The stars, for all that they were on a small curving corner of rock in the middle of the ocean, were very bright. 

The naval barracks were to the east, the same direction as the Governor-General's residence, and they passed a few steps down to a stretching sandy beach. 

"Let's go in the sea," the prince announced. He held his arms wide.

Beatrice and Ben, hanging back, looked at each other. Beatrice necked the fizz and passed it back to Ben. Who were they, their faces told each other, immediately understanding and without speaking, to say no to a prince? And if there was something else understood without speaking, there was enough to not think about it for now. 

Don Pedro ran into the peeling surf, his arms outstretched, laughing at the moon.

"Christ," Ben said, between his teeth, then, "After you, my lady," and before Beatrice could tell him off for being smart, he was running too, and she was damned if she wasn't going to catch up.

"Oh, fuck!" she said when she hit the water. It was cold. 

"Fuck me!" Ben said, hopping. He was trying to keep the spray from getting into the cava, and keep the cava from spilling, and succeeding at neither.

"Fuck everything!!!" the prince said. 

Beatrice had to catch her breath from laughing. 


End file.
